This is no time to die for cinemas - and they won’t

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

"Saturday night at the movies, who cares what picture you see. When you're huggin' with your baby In the last row in the balcony." So sang The Drifters in a song that perfectly captured the cinema experience of 1964, which arguably is no different 56 years later. "Well, there's technicolor and cinemascope, and a cast out of Hollywood. And the popcorn from the candy stand makes it all seem twice as good."

Except, more than half a century on, we're not going out to the movies, on Saturdays or any other night of the week. The coronavirus has, evidently, put paid to a British tradition dating back to 1896 when Auguste and Louis Lumière brought their Cinématographe technology to London to show off the short silent films they’d made. In the decades that followed, cinema became both a source of welcome escapism and a window on the world. By the end of the 1920s, just as the silent era gave way to the first talking pictures, cinemas had become fixtures in most major towns. Almost 100 years on, and last year some 176 million cinema tickets were sold in the UK, the second highest on record since 1970. And then COVID struck.

Six months on since the lockdown came, that Saturday night tradition is, like so many businesses, apparently in ruins. An industry that had remained surprisingly resilient in the face of widening home entertainment choices (compare this with, say, the impact of streaming services on the physical media music industry - we still valued that big-screen experience) has been forced onto its knees. Yesterday, the Odeon chain - a name synonymous with cinema - announced that it was cutting the opening hours of some of its UK and Ireland screens, with a quarter of its theatres only now opening on Fridays and Saturdays. Worse came from Cineworld, the chain which controls around one in seven of the UK’s screens, which announced the temporary closure of its venues.

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

The culprit? Well, obviously the coronavirus, but the repeated villain in the piece appears to be James Bond. Last Friday’s announcement from MGM and Eon, the ‘home’ of 007, that No Time To Die was to be delayed - again - to next April, one whole year after it’s original release date, sent a chilling shudder through the cinema industry. It had been counting on the 25th Bond film to fill coffers emptied by months of lockdown closures, followed by restricted openings with reduced seating due to social distancing requirements. That, though, only tells half the story. To blame Bond is not entirely fair. True, No Time To Die would have been an extraordinary draw, but in many respects, this is more to do with Hollywood as a whole. At the end of the day, there’s been an overall dearth of new, high-volume blockbusters to draw in the multiplex crowds, even those prepared to endure distancing and mask-wearing throughout screenings. Without the audiences, studios are reluctant to release the big-draw titles. Without the big-draw titles, punters are reluctant to venture out.

No Time To Die, Robert Mitchell of Gower Street Analytics told Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, “is the straw that broke the camel’s back”, pointing out how release dates from the bigger studios - an industry dominated by just a handful - have been moving for some time. “Ultimately the cinemas need a pipeline of regular content to draw cinema goers in,” he added. The trouble, here, is that the cinema industry has become over-reliant on the blockbusters. Bond may have been seen as the industry’s Autumn saviour, but this year we’ve seen delays to guaranteed seat-fillers like Fast And Furious 9, Marvel's Black Widow, Wonder Woman 1984 and Top Gun: Maverick. What has been released hasn’t exactly inspired confidence amongst the major studios: Christopher Nolan’s Tenet only earned $45 million in the US market. If a cinephile release like that can experience such miserable box office returns, the coming months of a second spike of the coronavirus and local lockdowns simply means that for the studios, releasing a high-budget film simply makes no economic sense. Not even streaming - such as Disney’s live-action Mulan being made available via the Disney+ service on a pay-per-view basis - can truly replicate the cash generated by box office receipts. “If going straight to streaming was a slam dunk, then all studios would be doing it,” one former industry executive told The Times. "The theatrical and studio worlds are interdependent,” they added saying that Disney’s experiment had proved far from conclusive, pointing out that for a film to be a hit on streaming services it “generally needs a good result at the cinema” as well.

This, though, highlights a point that many critics of the film industry have been saying for some time, that the industry’s reliance on a handful of franchises, be it Bond or the Marvel ‘universe’ to sell Saturday night popcorn by the bucketload, is a false economy. A $200 million-budget action movie still needs to cover its costs, as much as it promises to satisfy an audience’s need for the instant gratification that a $50 million independent production might not deliver, even if it would satisfy a more cultural nutrition, not to mention balance the books with a healthy return. One irony of all this, if you can call it that when thousands of people are facing redundancy, is that the UK is consolidating its status as a global production centre for film. Film and ‘high-end’ television production in the UK has become one of the country’s biggest industries, with studio capacity increasing all the time. According to the BFI, the value of UK production activity last year was £1.95 billion, representing 93 new homegrown films and 23 co-productions, with films carrying budgets of £30 million or over accounting for 78% of total UK film production spend. High-quality television production represented another £1.67 billion last year, a 29% increase from 2018. Comcast, the owner of Sky, recently announced plans to build 14 production stages at Elstree, creating 2,000 skilled jobs in the process. Seren Stiwdios - formerly Pinewood Wales, near Cardiff - is planning to add a further 150,000 square feet of stages and other facilities to cope with demand, which has even seen normally US-based productions move to the principality.

Picture: Twitter/James Bond

Arguably the constant demand for television series is understandable, and won’t diminish while we’re all staying at home. Film won’t be going away though: some optimists believe that despite this week’s gloom across the cinema industry, the experience of China, where repeated lockdowns have been ridden out, and cinemas have rebounded, points to a dam-burst of cinematic life next spring. That won’t comfort any of Cineworld’s 5,000 employees facing a bleak Christmas, or for those delightful independent picture houses who differentiate locally from the multiplexes. But for those - like me - who still value the big-screen experience significantly over living room consumption, the industry that has sustained Saturday nights out for more than 100 years is merely going into hibernation. And I will still be at the front of the queue next April for that Bond film.